Range Fuels got a new logo today (I liked the one they had before better). I took a few more looks through their web site and found a nice high-level description of their production process.
The gist is fairly simple. Use a source of biomass (in this case trees) as a source of carbon feed stock. Heat the feed in the absence/low concentration of oxygen, a process called pyrolysis, to generate syngas – a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Syngas is a valuable fuel source that can be transformed into a variety of end products. In this case, RangeFuels claims to have a catalyst (or multiple catalysts perhaps) to convert syngas into a variety of liquid fuels including methanol, ethanol, propanol, and butanol. This is an excellent feature in that they have the capability to manage their product mix based on economic conditions. Its not clear that ethanol will remain a big player in the fuels market. Biobutanol, for example, is gaining support as a liquid fuel because it has a high energy content and does not readily absorb water making it suitable to transport via oil pipelines. They may be able to modify their process to produce 1,3 Propane-diol, a valuable input into a variety of industrial products including adhesives and plastics. In short, they have the capability of meeting fuel demands – or other economic demand for alcohols – no matter what the end product purports to be. This is a valuable capability for their future viability.
This is a very tried-and-true model for processing hydrocarbons. Although it comes with a high capital investment, it is a well understood and road-tested method for producing hydrocarbons and other chemicals. It has been done in a variety of places throughout the world (South Africa most notably given the fuel embargoes during their practice of apartheid).
Range Fuels is one of the few companies that is developing a thermoprocessing-based technology instead of a typical fermentation and refinement process such as Iogen. Range Fuels is currently building a plant in Soperton, Georgia and is backed, among others, by Khosla Ventures.
